Vehicle design has advanced to a state in which occupant comfort and convenience, sometimes called ergonomics or human factors, is on at least an even par with the transportive aspects of a vehicle. This evolution has been driven by the availability of new technologies, including instrument panel clusters, adjustable steering wheels and columns, vehicle electronics, and movable seats, to mention only a few. With the addition of each new technology to the automotive vehicle environment, however, has come additional complexity in packaging the various occupant appurtenances to best achieve both design and ergonomic functionality.
One aspect of this packaging task is to provide an occupant, particularly a vehicle driver, with sufficient space between adjacent vehicle systems. That is, a vehicle design goal is to locate vehicle systems and vehicle structure, such as a manual gear shift, a knee bolster, a steering column and steering wheel, a seat, a hand brake, a door trim armrest, the inner roof, and the like, so that an occupant has adequate appendage clearance for system operation or for a comfortable environment. Current practice relies on various methods to determine whether a proposed design meets preferred occupant-to-vehicle interaction requirements. Typically, a proposed design is analyzed in two-dimensions which requires many "cuts" of a drawing. A three-dimensional "buck" is also used to give a better overall view of the design, but such physical representations are expensive, time consuming, and difficult to modify for a subsequent design. Since there may be many individual components which affect occupant interaction, the tasks associated with capturing all of the required human interaction factors packaging requirements are daunting. For example, a single knee bolster study, which determines whether knee bolster placement allows adequate leg room, can require several hours to complete. In total, performing human factors interaction studies typically requires many weeks under current practice, assuming the availability of experienced analysts to conduct all of the individual studies.
An additional problem with current design practice is that it leaves room for errors, due to the complex instructions required to perform the studies. Current design practice also is inflexible in that a change in one component, even a minor component, requires all human factors interaction studies to be redone, resulting in greater expense and delay of design completion.